Hey, so, like. Do any of you remember back in April of 2017 when I mentioned that I was going to be making a Jyn Erso costume?
Well, I’m making a Jyn Erso costume.
I have actually been working on this costume since I finished the Luke Skywalker jacket in February but due to changing jobs and going through a bit of a rough patch mentally I really didn’t get a great deal of work done on it. And all I’ve really done for it is royally screw up my attempt at her shirt and finish her jacket.
Now this jacket….took an absurd about of time considering how very little I technically had to do on it. It was an altered dark navy blue turtleneck and I only had to change 3 things.
- Cut down the front from neck to hem.
- . Shorten and hem the jacket so it is at waist level
- Add strips of brown pleated fabric to both sleeves.
Guys…do you want to guess what took me a long time to do? If you guessed the pleated sleeves you would be 150% correct. I spent a lot of time on twitter and instagram stories bitching about this jacket with very little progress to show for it. Because it was so hard to motivate myself to work on these pleats. I really don’t enjoy making pleats even though I really love how they look when they’re done.
From neck to wrist was 22 inches. So I needed 22 inches of pleated fabric. So first, I cut out a bunch of inch wide strips of brown fabric that I sewed together end to end until I had two strips of fabric that were 77 inches long. Then I hemmed all four sides a half inch so that in the end the strips were only 1 inch wide. Then I started pleating. But later, I then had to add 16 inches of fabric because with how tight I needed the pleats to be it wasn’t going to make the 22 inches. So in the end I pleated two 93 inch long strips of fabric down to 22 inches, filled with pins like a tiny death snake.
Then I had to carefully sew these pin filled monsters down as close to the edge as possible so that the pleats would be permanent. This was very slow, I bent so many pins, my thread kept tangling. It was a nightmare. But I managed to sew them all down, free them of their pins and iron the ever loving crap out of them.
As you can see they are a little bit wavy and a little uneven in width in some spots but I wasn’t going to dwell on it. It helps give the jacket a rougher, more ‘been through hell’ type of feel that I feel adds to the authenticity of a Star Wars costume considering Jyn was basically a dirty rebel for the majority of her life. I chalked it up to pre-weathering weathering and went onto the final step.
Handsewing these strips onto the sleeves.
It took a long time, it wasn’t fun because I had to be careful not to sew the sleeves shut as I went. I used a small embroidery hoop which helped out a lot but I still poked myself a ton and it was a slow process.
But in the end…it was so worth it. I’m so happy with it so far and having the jacket done is really helping motivate me to keep working on the rest of the costume.
Since I messed up her shirt I went out and bought a pattern for attempt two so I’ll talk about that more in another post. I’m making (really rather shitty) youtube videos about this process too, but I am going to link to those on this blog only after the costume is done.
Check my sewing instagram for more frequent updates.
Also??? I’m just not going to apologize for / comment on the time between my posts anymore.
But yeah, thanks for checking in friends.
Cheers.
And Now Sewing 